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Background: Standard total mesorectal resection has become an important treatment option for locally advanced or high-risk rectal cancer after neoadjuvant chemo-radiotherapy. 15–27% of patients can achieve pathological complete response (PCR) after neoadjuvant chemo-radiotherapy (nCRT). However, the relationship between PCR and postoperative complications remains an important unsolved problem. The objective of this study was to determine whether PCR was associated with the rate of postoperative complications. Methods: This meta-analysis was implemented following the recommendations from Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. We searched electronic literature by PubMed, EMBASE, and Google Scholar. Major outcomes of interest included anastomotic leakage, surgical-site infection, reoperation, and any postoperative complications. Other outcomes comprised postoperative hemorrhage, ileus, and mortality. Results: Eleven thousand two hundred ninety patients in 9 studies were included in the meta-analysis. The pooled analysis revealed that patients with PCR did not have a higher risk of anastomotic leakage (OR = 1.22, 95% CI 0.92–1.62, p = 0.17), reoperation (OR = 1.13, 95% CI 0.93–1.37, p = 0.22), and any postoperative complications (OR = 1.02, 95% CI 0.91–1.15, p = 0.72) than patients with non-PCR. However, the meta-analysis showed that the PCR group was superior to the non-PCR group in terms of surgical-site infection (9.38% vs. 12.44%OR = 0.68, 95% CI 0.47–0.98; p = 0.04). Conclusion: PCR might not be related to the occurrence of postoperative complications in rectal cancer patients following nCRT. In addition, PCR might be associated with a lower risk of surgical-site infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The survival advantage of radiotherapy (RT) for patients with metastatic esophagus cancer has not been adequately evaluated. This study aims to find out the role of RT for metastatic esophagus cancer and to find the different effect for RT to esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). This study included 5,970 metastatic esophagus cancer patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, registered from January 2004 to December 2013. Propensity score (PS) analysis with 1:1 nearest neighbor matching method was used to ensure well-balanced characteristics of all comparison groups by histological types. The Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazardous models were used to evaluate the overall survival (OS), cancer-specific survival (CSS), and corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI). Generally speaking, EAC did not get survival benefit from RT (median OS for RT group vs. no-RT group—8.0, 7.6–8.4 vs. 9.0, 8.5–9.5, P  = 0.073), whereas RT for metastatic ESCC did significantly improve OS (median OS for RT group vs. no-RT group—8.0, 7.4–8.6 vs. 7.0, 6.4–7.6, P  = 0.044). Therefore, compared with adenocarcinoma, ESCC could get more survival benefit from RT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]